Angle of Observation
by LadySilver
Summary: Charlotte may be a kid and she may not have had the most normal upbringing. Maybe that's why she can see what the others can't. One-shot.


_A/N: Written for tptigger as part of the genfic exchange, based on a request for a story about Charlotte saving the day. This story is not related in any way to_ "ninety-nine decision street"_ and was, in fact, written several months prior to it.__ As always, comments, questions, concrit, and squee are all welcome._

**Angle of Observation**

by LadySilver

"There's more of them every day." Cara's tone had that mix of confused and amazed that Charlotte heard in adults sometimes when they were getting exactly what they said they wanted, yet still weren't happy.

Charlotte came to a stop beside the control room door to hear what Cara had to say next. She'd been wandering around the former ULTRA building, following a current of anxiety that had been flowing through its inhabitants for days until its prickling under Charlotte's skin became too strong to ignore. Everyone in the Refuge was on edge, short-tempered without being able to say why. And, as Charlotte found her way up to the command center, the current only picked up speed and power until its psychic force threatened to knock her feet out from under her.

Pressing herself closer to the doorway, she peered around the frame into the room where the two leaders of the Tomorrow People stood in tense discussion. The people who normally hung on in this room had been kicked out, or had left on their own for the day, which left Cara and Stephen alone. They gave no indication of knowing that Charlotte was listening; they probably didn't know she was even in the building. Ever since they'd gotten John back, Cara and Stephen had turned all their energies toward dealing with the new breakouts. And this, Charlotte quickly realized, was the source of the anxiety she, and everyone else, had been feeling.

"We're running out of room for everyone," Stephen agreed, confirming her assessment. "I can't believe that a building this size filled up so quickly." He rubbed his temples, the strain of being the co-leader of the Tomorrow People etched across his face. Charlotte had never known him not to be worried or stressed about something, but lately he'd started to look bowed under the weight. He leaned against one of the computer workstations that used to be used for tracking new breakouts and started absently at the screens on the wall over Cara's head that were used only for playing video games now, when they were used at all.

Cara laid a hand on Stephen's arm, the smallest drop of comfort in the ocean of his stress. "At least we don't have to steal all our supplies. TIM hacked into the ULTRA reserves. Between that and the Founder's estate, there's enough money to keep us set for awhile."

"How long is awhile?" Stephen asked. "How long can we take care of everyone, especially with all the _kids_ showing up. How long until money's not the problem and instead the police start showing up to deal with all the 'runaways'?"

"They're not really kids," Cara pointed out. "Mostly it's fifteen and sixteen year olds."

"Yeah, _kids_. They're Luca's age. My little brother. They're still in school. Or are supposed to be. Someone's eventually going to notice that the employees at ULTRA have gotten a few decades younger and like to play loud music when they're putting in overtime!"

They were good concerns, Charlotte thought. Just...the way Stephen was talking, it was like he didn't know why all the Tomorrow People were coming here. She'd thought Cara, at least, was more attuned to what was going on than that, but Cara didn't leap in to offer any correction to Stephen's thinking. If the way she was twisting the ends of her hair was any indication, she had no idea what was going on either. Charlotte puzzled over this gap between what the Tomorrow People's leaders should know and what they were saying for awhile, growing more confused at what seemed to her to be the two adults missing the obvious before she couldn't take it anymore.

Stepping into the room, she burst out with an "Um, hi?" that sounded too loud to her ears, then dropped her gaze to her feet as the rest of what she wanted to say fled.

At the interruption, Cara let out a gasp of startlement that turned to a sigh of relief when she saw who it was. Concern flared. "Charlotte? Honey?" She closed the distance between them with a couple of swift steps and knelt down, already searching her for signs of injury or distress. "Are you OK? What happened? Did you get lost?" Cara's hand coasted over Charlotte's just-brushed hair and down the side of her face as she talked, finally finishing with taking up Charlotte's hands in her own, only to frown at the bitten nails she saw there. "Did something scare you?"

Shaking her head, Charlotte tried to project a calm she didn't quite feel. She liked Cara; she really did. So far, she hadn't met any Tomorrow People in the Refuge that she didn't like. Cara could just be so—Charlotte scuffed the toe of her shoe against the gray cement floor and tried to think of an appropriate word. Eventually, she settled on _forceful_. Cara was forceful. Determined. And that could make her hard to be around because it made Charlotte see all the ways in herself that she was still a kid.

Cara was still fussing over her, though, asking her questions that weren't as easy to answer as might seem. It made her think of her parents, which was strange because she didn't really remember her parents except at people who were always worried about whether she'd brushed her teeth or had gotten enough sleep. Thinking about her real parents now made her miss them, and made her miss Errol, who had been like a father to her in the Citadel, and now she was getting misty-eyed and Cara was asking even more questions, and Stephen had come over and was trying to get her to look at him while he also asked questions. Charlotte took a deep breath and squashed down the tears that were trying to well up so she could focus on what she'd come in here to say.

"Charlotte?" Cara asked again. Her grip tightened on Charlotte's hands as she took a guess at what Charlotte was upset about. "You know that Stephen and I were just talking, right? It's nothing you need to worry about. Leading the Tomorrow People is a big job and sometimes we just need to talk about the best ways to do it."

That hadn't sounded like what they were talking about at all, Charlotte thought. They hadn't been making plans, just complaining about the wrong problem. "It's not that." Her voice quavered, and she had to take another breath to steady herself, which made her feel a little like a fish gasping in the air. "It's..." She peered up through her eyelashes to see if Cara was listening. She couldn't tell, so she kept talking. "If there are too many of us, just stop having more Tomorrow People come here." Swallowing, she forced herself to find Cara's eyes, then Stephen's, since it was really his decision. "They don't have to. If you don't want them to."

"Charlotte?" Cara said, her worry spiking. "You don't think we want to get rid of you, do you?"

Stephen jumped in with his own reassurances. "You're one of us! Why would you think we don't want you around?"

For a couple of telepaths, Cara and Stephen were remarkably bad at following her thoughts. Charlotte shook her head, cutting them off. "What you were talking about before I came in," Charlotte started. Perhaps if she could get them back on that topic, they'd be able to follow her to her conclusion. "About there being too many Tomorrow People..."

"There can never be too many Tomorrow People," Cara interrupted, once again sliding right past what Charlotte was trying to say into a point that no one would argue. The sheer number of people around the world who were breaking out was the best guarantee of future safety for all of them. After years of being hunted and, in Charlotte's case, held captive and experimented on, that it would soon be impossible for the Tomorrow People to stay a secret was fantastic news.

Charlotte groaned, knowing that it was her inability to get her words together fast enough that was causing the miscommunication. If only she could be as confident in her decisions as the older Tomorrow People were. "I know there aren't," she said. "It's just, there are too many _here_." She gestured around the nearly empty control room—And that had to be the one thing that Cara and Stephen didn't misunderstand. Charlotte could feel herself growing even more frustrated, her stomach clenching so tight it hurt.

"We're not going to start kicking people out," Stephen protested. "We'll welcome anyone who's one of us. That's why it's called the Refuge. Cara?" The two leaders traded a look; there was no telepathic content behind it because Charlotte would have been able to hear it if there had been. Instead, it seemed to be the kind of look that people used when they only wished the other person could read their mind, like when they were trying not to be rude out loud.

"It's OK, Charlotte" Cara said, flashing an empty smile that was meant to be reassuring, but it wasn't because she wouldn't _understand_. "It doesn't matter how old you are; You're one of us, and that's all that matters."

The dismissal was clear, as was the reason for it. They thought she was too young. Charlotte's stomach clenched tighter, and she thought for a moment that she was going to puke right there on Cara's shoes.

She started to open her mouth to protest, but Cara was already leading her out of the command center. "Why don't you see what John's up to," she suggested with a slight push that made it clear that she expected Charlotte to run along now.

Still used to doing what she was told—in the Citadel punishment had been swift and harsh, and always the threat loomed over its captives of having their powers stripped if they tried to resist—Charlotte obeyed, even as she kicked herself for her inability to stand up to the people who had once saved her life.

Stomach still churning, she dragged her feet as she walked through the hallways. The corridors were lined with piles of clothes, backpacks, sleeping bags, and the other gear of people who had no other place to store their stuff. No one worried about theft here because hiding a secret like that was difficult in a place with dozens of telepaths. On the other hand, no one had objected when the graffiti started to appear, which meant the walls were now covered in spray paint artwork and chalk designs. Charlotte walked right past all of it without bothering to see if any new comments had been added. She didn't like when people didn't listen to her and it seemed that ignoring the graffiti allowed her some measure of getting even.

People milled around, though not as many as one would expect. The cafeteria had become the prime hang-out space in the former ULTRA building—and thank goodness the company had been big enough to have its own cafeteria—which meant that those in the hallways were usually just passing through. Normally, she would have stopped to talk to them, let them touch her and joke with her the way they used to with all the siblings they'd left behind. Today, she kept her head down and her thoughts to herself, so no one bothered to stop the clomping girl, and she was fine with that.

Avoiding the smell was harder. ULTRA's facilities only included a few showers, most of which were in the laboratories and were meant for dealing with chemical spills. Because of this, a general funk hung in the air that even the air conditioning wasn't strong enough to deal with. There really were too many people here, and more just kept coming in every day, which meant the smell and the crowding was only going to get worse if someone didn't get it through Stephen and Cara's head what needed to be done. Since her first attempt had failed so miserably, she wrinkled her nose and kept going.

Eventually, she found herself in the basement room that John had taken up. Back when ULTRA had trained kids to be operatives, they'd constructed a dormitory in the basement for them. The cells were small and windowless, not unlike the one she'd lived in at the Citadel. It was a bare, soulless place: The true ULTRA, rather than the futuristic Wonderland the upstairs pretended it was. White walls. White cement floor. Florescent bulbs set high in the ceiling, behind a shatterproof plastic, dispelled all the shadows except the one left by the hole where the D-chips used to be. John said this room was the one he'd had when he'd lived here, though she couldn't imagine why he would want it back. If she had been him, she'd have chosen any other room on any other floor.

John was a lot quieter since he'd come back to them. He wasn't sad, but he didn't seem to have the anger in him that he'd used to have. Or the energy. Mostly, he kept to himself and kept out of the way. Right now, he was lying on his cot, staring vacantly at a book. Most of his belongings were piled into boxes that he kept under the cot, save for a stack of books—on subjects whose names Charlotte couldn't pronounce much less hope to understand—that wobbled next to his bed. He spent a lot of time reading these days and a lot of time hiding down here, acting like a completely different person than the one she'd known.

Except when he was around her. Then sparks of his old personality flared up. She waited until he acknowledged her, waited until the corner of his mouth twitched into a smile at seeing her, before she went into his room. While she wasn't afraid of him dismissing her out the way Cara and Stephen had, some days he wasn't up for even her company, and she always waited to find out which day today was before bothering him. She understood what it was like when people wouldn't let you sort out the bad thoughts in your head.

"You can come in," he said, when he noticed her hesitation. "You look like you need to someone to talk to."

"Are you sure it's OK?" Charlotte glanced around the room, noting that John hadn't done anything to decorate the walls. Not even graffiti. It was like he wasn't planning to stay here very long, or didn't want people to know he _was_ here. Maybe she'd draw him a picture later and then he'd have something happy to look at while he got better. Yes, she decided, that was a good idea. He needed more color in his world.

The smile flickered across his lips and he confirmed what kind of day it was when he said, "I know I could use some company today. I've been sitting here reading and spending too much time thinking about my own problems; it'll do me some good to help you with yours, instead." She understood that, too. How sometimes it helped to not think about the bad thoughts in your head and to try to help other people with theirs, if they wanted it. "What's going on?"

"They won't listen to me," she complained, dropping onto the floor next to his bed. Thoughts of the picture she'd draw we're temporarily abandoned. She propped an arm on the edge of the mattress and leaned toward him. As she did, her glance fell on the book. As she'd suspected, John hadn't been reading it. Unless he found the dedication page worthy of deep contemplation.

John's brow wrinkled like he was getting ready to laugh at her, but he didn't. He never treated her that way, no matter what kind of day he was having. "Who?"

Charlotte let out a deep sigh; she shouldn't _have_ to explain something that was so obviously at the forefront of her thoughts. "Stephen and Cara. I overheard them talking. I wasn't _trying_ to listen in; I just happened to be where they were." She peered up at John, seeking evidence of whether he was going to yell at her for eavesdropping. He just nodded solemnly and encouraged her to go on with a small noise. Heartened, she told him about what she'd overheard and her response to it. By the end, she was speaking so quickly that her words poured over each other in a rush of sound. "I don't understand why they keep making everyone come here," she concluded, a small bounce emphasizing her doneness.

John looked at her closely and she felt surprise coming from him and something else, like awe? Whatever he'd been expecting her to talk about, this hadn't been it. He was all seriousness as he asked, "What do you mean? Who's making everyone come here?"

"_They_ are." Charlotte could tell that he didn't know what she meant, and that figured because adults were kind of bad at hanging on to the important details. She'd forgive him, though, because John's brain had gotten kind of screwed up with what Jedikiah did to it, so he sometimes had trouble hanging on to any details. For his sake, she decided to clarify. "Well, Stephen is mostly, but he's using Cara's telepathy to amplify the call. Can't you hear it?"

John went silenter than usual for a moment, his head tilted, listening. Finally, he shook his head. "I don't hear anything."

Trying not to let her impatience show, she explained: "Everyone keeps coming here because they were _invited_." This seemed like a really basic point to her, like commenting on how it got awfully dark when the lights went out.

John nodded like he understood. She hoped he really did. "So, Stephen's calling everyone here?"

"Yes!"

He listened again, and again found nothing to hear. "Are you sure?"

Now she was getting tired of being patient. "Why do you think everyone comes to New York City? Why did Cara come here after she got her powers? And why did Russell? They're all drawn here." She stopped, frowned, working her way through her own explanation. "I think it was Stephen's dad calling everyone at first, but then Stephen took over, and no one has told him what he's doing so he doesn't know it's OK to stop now."

John was nodding again. He _did_ understand. Charlotte bounced again, resisting the urge to lean over and peck him on the cheek. "And you tried to tell him?" he asked.

"Yes! But he wouldn't _listen to me_!" Her stomach began to clench again as her frustration returned. "They thought I was worried about being too young to be here or something." She huffed out the last, knowing as well as anyone how ridiculous it was. It wasn't like she had anywhere else to go, and besides John was here—again—and he'd become like her new dad, only a lot less strict than Errol.

"What else?" John prodded.

Not until he asked did Charlotte realize that there was more to her disquiet. To her surprise, she heard herself answering: "Then they get here and there's nothing for them to do." Obvious now that she'd said it, the idea was still raw and would need a lot more thinking about before she could try to get anyone else to understand. Especially given her track record, so far. Showers were part of it. And the cafeteria hangout. Along with the smell of unwashed bodies, she thought about the general anxiety that was festering in the building, the restlessness of people getting bored with waiting. She imagined that Cara and Stephen were picking up on that; she thought they were, anyway. That would explain why they'd been sniping at each other so much.

John rolled into a sitting position, pushing the unread book aside. His eyes were tired and his clothes rumpled, but he was here and he knew who she was. Blond stubble even lined his cheeks like it used to.

"I like it better when you don't shave so often," she told him suddenly. She reached up to touch the stubble and John didn't even flinch away. "It makes you look a lot more like you."

"I feel a lot more like me than I have been," he agreed. As if he'd said everything on that topic that there was to say, he turned the conversation back. "You figured all this out in your own?"

"Well, _yeah_," she said. "It's not like it's a secret!" As soon as she said it, she felt bad for being so impatient, but then John gave her another one of his smiles and she knew he wasn't mad the way a lot of adults got when kids reminded them that they didn't know everything.

Now that they were talking, Charlotte's mind began to tumble with questions. Unable to restrain herself, she blurted out "What did you do when you were here? Before? When you were a kid?"

"Here?" John asked, gesturing around the room that was so small that he had to be deliberately misunderstanding her.

Miffed, she punched his arm. "Noooo. I meant in ULTRA. You grew up here. What did you do?"

"Training," John answered immediately, rubbing his arm where she'd tapped him. "A lot of training about how to use our powers and how to be agents."

Since he was listening to her, she decided to ask him the real question on her mind. "I know we don't want to start ULTRA up again..." Charlotte shuddered at the thought of that. As long as the organization was gone, so was the Citadel. She'd never be sent back there; she'd get to grow up out in the world, with the freedom to do whatever she wanted. All the Tomorrow People were free go where they wanted now. She was starting to realize, though, that it was possible to have too much freedom. All the people who were coming to the Refuge, they needed someone to tell them what to do next. They were _looking_ for someone to tell them what to do next. "Why can't we start the training sessions up? You used to have them in the Lair. We could train the people who come here and then send them home. It's not like they need to stay here to stay safe."

John stood up, pulling Charlotte to her feet too. Next to him, she usually felt small, but he was looking at her right now as if she were the leader, and she'd never felt taller. "You're right," he said. "That's exactly what we need to do." He headed toward the door, book abandoned.

"Right now?" she asked. She wasn't sure if she was supposed to follow him or get out of the way.

At the doorway, he stopped, a tick of his chin indicating that she should go first. "Right now," John answered. "It's your idea. Let's go make people listen to it."


End file.
